In part 1 of this saga I described how I stumbled upon what later became known as Van Eck Phreaking and how the FBI asked me very nicely to not mention it to anyone. Sadly that wasn’t my last encounter with the New York FBI office. My next encounter came when I decided I really wanted to know what the word TEMPEST the FBI agent had mumbled about in my last encounter really meant. More Magnavox My next exposure to TEMPEST came when I used another Magnavox product, the Orion 60, on the movie Wolfen (A whole ‘nother blog post). This CP/M computer made by Magnavox’s government division used a DC p ..read more

This post has languished as a draft since last spring. Sorry for the delay – Howard Towards the end of my previous life as an analyst, I realized that tools and techniques form the high performance computing (HPC) world were working their way into the enterprise data center in ways they never had before. At VAST Data some of our customers come from HPCland and I’m discovering that the HPC folks sometimes have their own names for technologies they share with the enterprise data center that’s been my home for the past 30 some-odd years. Today’s example of the HPC/corporate naming gap is Decluste ..read more

I’ve been hearing people declare tape to be dead so long that it’s become cliché. While tape has seen it’s day as a direct backup medium, tape has remained the least expensive way to store large amounts of data for long periods of time, and modern tape systems are a lot more reliable than the memories of 8mm, DDS and DLT breakdowns would indicate. Today it seems that the two companies that still make magnetic tape have decided to use their patent portfolios to keep each other from selling the latest LTO tape cartridges (LTO-7 and LTO-8) in one of the stupidest business moves I’ve seen in decad ..read more